13 slide presentations, Dornach, Oct. 8, 1916 – Oct. 29, 1917 CW 292 Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is a field in which the evolution of consciousness is symptomatically and transparently revealed.

This informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a moment when the negative consequences of what he called “the age of the consciousness soul,” which had begun around 1417, were most terribly made apparent. In these lectures he sought to provide an antidote to pessimism. After describing the movement of consciousness from Greece into Rome, which coupled with influences from the Orthodox East, he showed how these influences transformed as the Middle Ages became the Renaissance.

The process that begins with Cimabue and Giotto develops, deepens, and becomes more conscious in the great Renaissance masters Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. And then the continuation of this movement in the Northern masters—Du¨rer and Holbein, as well as the whole German tradition. An entire lecture is devoted to Rembrandt, followed by one on Dutch and Flemish painting. Thus themes are woven together that bring us into the way in which past epochs of consciousness and art live again in our consciousness soul epoch.

Replete with interesting information and over 600 color and black and white images, these lectures are rich and dense with ideas, enabling one to understand both the art of the Renaissance and the transformation of consciousness that it announced. These lectures demonstrate (to paraphrase Shelley) that artists truly are “the unacknowledged legislators of the age.”